


Stopgap Measures

by Sakiku



Category: Transformers: Prime
Genre: Moresomes, Other, Plug and Play, Tentacles
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-04
Updated: 2012-12-04
Packaged: 2017-11-20 06:55:32
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,622
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/582544
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sakiku/pseuds/Sakiku
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Soundwave is suffering because he has only one symbiont left. He needs to resort to unconventional measures to survive.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Stopgap Measures

**Author's Note:**

> As you might have already guessed - -another prompt: <http://tfanonkink.livejournal.com/3587.html?thread=5376771>

A wave of electric static pulsed across Soundwave's sensors, nearly overwhelming him in its intensity. Any other mech might have felt a slight anomaly of the Nemesis' EM field, but Soundwave's receptors lit up to a painful degree. He braced himself and stoically remained upright.

Even if he had not been the one to instigate it, Soundwave would have recognized the characteristic frequency anywhere: The ground bridge. Opened.

Within two millikliks Knockout and Breakdown shot through in vehicle mode, Breakdown a bit slower than the sports car medic due to his bulk. The medic laughed the entire way, cackled actually, and once out of the portal did a somersault to channel his forward kinetic energy into a spin and a transformation into root mode. Then he smugly waved the relic he had been tasked to retrieve.

Soundwave didn't need to look at them. He could tell from their exhilarated and slightly agitated EM fields that they had just slipped out from beneath the Autobot's retaliation, probably leaving enough of them alive to chase them. With pin-point precision, Soundwave closed the ground bridge just as the first Autobot was about to follow through.

As usual, the dissolving portal sprayed him with another painful shower of EM emissions. But there was no Bulkhead or Bumblebee on the Nemesis, so he considered his job well-done.

Soundwave was a master of precise timing, reactions measured to the microklik by electroreceptors finer and more numerous than any other surviving mech had. If he put all his processing power to it, Soundwave could even go so far as to distinguish the fluctuations generated by another bot's quantum processors – without establishing a hardline or comlink first.

He was capable of true telepathy, a skill that had been beyond rare even during Cybertron's golden age.

Such sensitivity towards electromagnetic fields had been reserved for a special subclass of communication mechs, the deep space communicators. And there hadn't ever been more than half a hundred of them at the most.

Giving him an irreverent smirk as always, Knockout sauntered off to present his find to their Lord, Breakdown in his wake. There was no need to read the medic's thoughts to know he was quite satisfied with himself, both for accomplishing his task and for outwitting and outpacing the yellow Autobot. And he probably thought that he could use this victory to lord over Soundwave in Lord Megatron's presence.

Racer frames were quite predictable.

Seeker frames even more so. It was almost a pity that irreverent, sycophantic, traitorous Starscream had deserted once again. Soundwave had gotten so used to the small manipulations necessary to keep the flier on track of their Decepticon cause.

Soundwave used far less telepathy than most mechs thought – it would take far too much out of him to go around reading the thoughts of every single mech he encountered. They simply fell into easily predictable patterns to the skilled observer, and their readily available EM fields told of the rest.

Soundwave didn't mind the reputation though. The less mechs knew about the true capabilities of a deep space communicator, the more careful they were in his presence. Rumor had it that he could hear someone plotting against him from the other end of the Nemesis.

Not quite incorrect, although it was for the very mundane reason that he was habitually jacked in to the Nemesis' surveillance system.

But once again, he refrained from correcting their assumptions. And there was nobody alive to tell them differently. Deep space communication mechs were gone now. He was the last of a subclass, the second to last of both a class and its corresponding frame type. Like many other bots were.

His nucleus?

Gone.

His symbionts?

Gone, save for Laserbeak.

But one symbiont wasn't enough for a communicator of his sensitivity. If Blaster hadn't been an Autobot – if he hadn't been lost in space for more than a hundred vorns now – Soundwave might have asked him to do a symbiont transferal. Because last that Soundwave knew, Blaster still had had a full set of five symbionts, and the other communication mech was only a ground communicator. Those frames weren't as sensitive to EMs as deep space communicators. They used their symbionts mainly for increased multi-processing capability and redundancy, a non-vital task. Soundwave though needed his symbionts for shielding, keeping himself sane both in the void of space and the noise of planet-side.

But Blaster was an Autobot, and anyway, symbionts weren't built for war.

Soundwave didn't pace up and down. That would neither exacerbate nor ameliorate the steady bombardment of electromagnetic frequencies of all wavelengths and amplitudes.

He had learned to compensate. Been forced to, lest the constant high-volume input started to overwrite his personality net or cause critical failure.

Soundwave's nucleus had consisted of a sizable subset of all deep space communicators. Frequency with her playful encryption riddles. Scalesinger and his woven communication streams. Amplitude, Oscillator, Volume, and later on Synthesizer and Harmonics. They all had floated in the silence of space for vorns at a time, isolating and enhancing and collecting all signals they detected, and forwarding them to their appropriate target destination. Some of them had been stationed in a geosynchronous orbit around Cybertron, others at colonies or important waypoints.

Their frames had been built around that task, giving them signal transmission and analyzing capabilities that were unparalleled even by other communicators. They had to be capable of receiving messages that had come from the outer-most colonies, been distorted by pulsars and wormholes, suffered from red- or blue-shift, and had become so weak from the distance that they barely reached above the ever-present microwave background. And they had to be able to send beams strong and focused enough that there was a guarantee they reached the other colonies.

It had been a function. A lonely function, but a fulfilling function nonetheless. On the fragile communication net Soundwave had spun between the planets as the hub of their nucleus, they had played games, had sent images back and forth, had been in each others' processors the entire time despite millions of lengths separating them physically and most of their processing power dedicated to helping other mechs communicate.

His nucleus.

Gone, one by one and even two at a time, until space around Cybertron had been as quiet as their frame class was known for being on the ground. Somehow, Soundwave had managed to wrap their broken links around himself until it hadn't hurt so badly anymore.

His symbionts had been even closer. Docked to his chest, their small sparks pressed anxiously against his larger one, they had been there to relieve the madness of total physical isolation in space, there to shield the madness of constant electromagnetic bombardment on a planetary surface.

They had been spark of his spark, individuals just as dependent on him as he was on them. They had been a constant presence in the processor he had exclusively reserved for them. Without his resources, their small frames would have been too restricted for higher emotional computation; with his resources they were fully operational mechs. Rumble. Frenzy. Ravage. Laserbeak. Buzzsaw. Ratbat.

His symbionts.

Gone now, too, save Laserbeak.

The small flight frame anchored to his chest didn't move, but Soundwave could feel its small spark trying to reach out for his in an attempt of consolation. Laserbeak had had the entire symbiont processor to itself for more than two thousand vorns, gradually learning what to do with all the processing power available to it.

But Laserbeak alone wasn't enough. The staunch flier could dampen some of the ever-present electromagnetic stimulus, for some time at least. But it never was enough to truly allow Soundwave to rest. Deep space communicators with their hypersensitive equipment needed at least three symbionts for that. And there were no resources to build more, especially not when there was a war going on and their small frames were so incredibly vulnerable.

Soundwave's code would have become corrupted beyond repair a long time ago if he hadn't found a solution for that, too.

His pedes carried him down to the lower levels of the Nemesis, most of his processors busy with trying to wade through the overabundance of sensory input. Humans with their wireless communication. Mechs with their comlinks and fields. The engines of the Nemesis. The computer circuitry and the limited ship AI all around him. They all filled his sensor buffers to the limit, making him strain to keep up with the input because his coding would allow nothing less.

One time, in a desperate bid, he had tried switching off his receptors. But no sooner had he turned them off than spark-case deep programming erupted into a sudden screech of _blindHelplessAloneAloneAloneBlindDeafBlindHelplessAloneBlindBlindBlind_ , panic like he had never experienced before. It had taken nearly a joor before he had been able to return to proper processing again.

He had never repeated the experiment. Fighting against spark-case coding was futile.

Transmitting a brief ID key to the door sensors towards the lower levels, Soundwave shuffled and organized his processor load as much as he could in preparation for what was going to come. Only his priority listeners towards his Lord's personal frequency and the general communication channels remained untouched. Additionally, he remained in constant wireless contact with the Nemesis' surveillance system so that it couldn't be said he had left his post.

Laserbeak's spark pulsed once again, a mixture of pain that it couldn't do its job and happiness that Soundwave would find at least a bit of respite. Soundwave sent a mental caress, leaving a package with a link to the feed of his physical input in his symbiont processor. The flight frame greedily snatched it up, chirring happily into their bond. Laserbeak always loved seeing and feeling and experiencing what Soundwave did, even if the communicator had to filter it heavily to make it readable when run through the one symbiont processor.

The lower levels of the Nemesis looked no different from the upper ones. He strode through stark metal corridors, kept in pristine condition by an army of micro-repair-drones and cleaning-bots. Those were housed even deeper inside the Nemesis, their inactive forms stacked ten and twenty high on top of each other while they weren't in use. They had no spark and no personality, and thus no need for personal space or quarters. They were simply an extension of the Nemesis' AI.

The bots on the current level were hardly more than drones in the opinion of most.

Their templates had been energon mine workers originally, barely enough code to operate the drills, cut out the ore, and load it into their vehicle mode for transportation. Their make was simple, all from the same mold, and their sparks equally simple. But they hadn't been drones despite what general opinion was, and they had labored and suffered under atrocious conditions. When Lord Megatron had freed them, they had unanimously joined the Decepticon cause. And when Lord Megatron had offered them weapons and the programming to use them after that, they had sworn eternal loyalty to their Lord and renamed themselves Eradicon in honor of their new function.

They had become an entire army at their Lord's disposal, and Lord Megatron had gladly made use of them.

It was a bit ironic that now, long after the original Eradicons had returned to the well, most of their cloned successors were once again tasked with mining Energon and were thought of as nothing more than drones by the majority of both Autobots and Decepticons.

But Soundwave knew the difference. There were worlds between electromagnetics of sparked and unsparked beings, something anyone with as fine a sensor net as Soundwave had, could never overlook.

Upon keying the door open to one of the Eradicons' main recreation rooms, he was greeted by a host of surprised fields. Their steady wireless chatter ceased for a moment before exploding into an excited frenzy. They looked at him greedily, but also with longing and worship, quivering with suppressed hunger.

Stepping further into the center of the common room so that he didn't block the entryway, Soundwave locked his actuators and his hydraulics against their excitedly pulsing fields. There was no need for him to say anything or to announce his intentions, because the more experienced Eradicons filled in the others.

There was only one reason he came down there in person anyways.

Slowly, one by one, Eradicons got up from their cubes of energon and stepped towards him, a few daring ones – ones that already knew the procedure – folding back the transformation sequence that hid their cervical port. They were drawn to him like iron filings to a magnet, both their processors and their frames.

An excited pulse ran through the room when Soundwave shifted his plates to bare his manipulator cables. The purple mechs reflexively clustered closer to him, barely short of touching him now, and Soundwave extended his long connectors to plug into the bared ports.

Despite his impersonal professionalism, every single one of them shuddered with the contact, a certain level of arousal leaking into their fields.

He squirted an extremely light-weight communication program through, guided the mechs in its installation, and then released the connection. And then he moved on to the next one and did the same, giving the entire software package when needed, the encryption key only when he had encountered the Eradicon before. Twenty-three new ones; eighteen familiar ones. A better percentage than several times before.

Connecting and disconnecting in smooth, practiced moves, he waded through the mechs until he was nearly in the center of the room. They parted before him and closed behind him, not quite touching him, but without restraint towards their fellow Eradicons.

Feeling the anticipatory hum all around him, Soundwave began to spin the fragile communications net as he had done so often before. First one Eradicon, then two, then five and ten and twenty, until they were all crosslinked with each other and humming in an excited semi-gestalt with Soundwave at the hub.

Almost like a nucleus.

Laserbeak on his chest trembled a bit, both with longing and revulsion. Because, needed as it was, it was a mockery of a nucleic link. The Eradicons' processors were so simple that they could never fulfill the demands of a true nucleus. A nucleus was presence, personality, intellect, composed of equal parts. None of the Eradicons came close to Harmony's talent for reading cosmic background radiation, to Scalesinger's fascination with encryption algorithms, or to any other member of his former nucleus. But for a short relief it was enough, enough to let Soundwave sink into the net with a sigh.

With the same courtesy he had always extended to his symbionts, Soundwave brushed across every processor in the link, greeting them upon recognition, welcoming them if they were new. There was always a certain amount of fluctuation amongst Eradicons, some being created, others being on duty or having fallen to accidents or the Autobots. They knew they were nothing but canon fodder, and yet they lived with it with all the non-thinking acceptance their minimally developed processors allowed them. They were Eradicons, and Eradicons were eternally loyal to the Decepticon cause.

Soundwave liked them because simple processors produced simple fields. Just like symbionts did.

For long breems, Soundwave simply stood in their center and let the steady drone of their fields buffer him. Eradicons came and went, were effortlessly spun into the net or released again. For a mech who had been a communication hub for thousands of vorns, such actions were instinctive, demanding nearly no processing power.

He had a filtering algorithm running that blotted their simple and, most importantly, predictable fields from his input buffer. What was left was as close to silence as deep space communicators could ever come. Because even out in space there was constant radiation, starting from the microwave background of creation to high-energy gamma bursts escaping from living and dying stars throughout the universe.

But here, amongst the cluster of mechs, their immediate closeness absorbed and blocked most of the weaker signals. If not for the atmospheric absorption of frequencies and the gravity, Soundwave would have been tempted to forget that he was on a planetary surface.

In the near-silence, Soundwave waded through his own code, repairing and updating, recalibrating his sensors and fine-tuning them in ways he could never accomplish when his processors were busy with the full volume of his input. Slowly, percent by percent, his buffers emptied and his processor load diminished until he felt as light as if he was flying. Only the steady presence of Eradicons swirled around him, routed through the processor partition set aside for them.

Together with him, Laserbeak reveled in the freedom of being shielded, which normally only came with a full set of symbionts doing their duties.

In the near-silence, the not so subtle thread of anticipation grew as the Eradicons sunk fully into the link.

They chattered excitedly on the net Soundwave had spun between them, communication suddenly much easier when another held the threads and they could dedicate their entire processing power to the slowly emerging cloud-mind. Data was exchanged smoother and more rapidly; clusters of parallel processing emerged amongst several mechs – formed and processed and disbanded again to search for others to parallel process with.

But the silence never lasted long. Unused as Eradicons were to the tight link spanning around them, they didn't channel the net energy with the necessary efficiency. Instead of letting the fields wash through them, they unconsciously absorbed a small part with every transmission. And all the little stolen charges were starting to add up – below the Eradicons' attention threshold for now, not for long anymore though.

Knowing that it was futile to fight against it, Soundwave introduced the first seed of deliberate pleasure to the net and watched it grow. It bounced back and forth between the mechs, accepted and propagated immediately by some, taking a bit longer with others. Every time it came back to him, he twirled another level of complexity to it and bounced it back out.

Soon the pseudo-gestalt of nearly fifty linked processors took on a life of its own as the pleasure melded the individuals together ever more tightly. They were surfing on an ever-growing charge that Soundwave guided and directed with the experienced hands of a master, more than any Eradicon would be capable of achieving alone.

Laserbeak, not quite part of the net but linked to it through the observatory feed Soundwave had left for it, chirred with excitement. Its spark spun tighter as the pleasure reached it, too, yet another bulwark against the constant bombardment of electromagnetic hypersensitivity. It stretched its wings and arched into Soundwave's invisible caress, expressing physically what Soundwave couldn't bring himself to.

He would have been content with nothing but a link overload. But once again the Eradicons weren't used to wireless interaction, and so they resorted to what they knew best. Tactile, hardline, anything shy of baring their sparks.

He stood in a sea of heating mechs that stroked themselves and each other indiscriminately, digging their talons into purple armor seams to tease at the hidden wires beneath, squeezing cables and chevrons and pulsing EM fields. And of course, the net fairly sparked with their arousal. Crude and simple, just like they were, but refreshing in their honest enjoyment.

They did not ask him outright – they never did – but he could feel it in the tenor of their gestalt mind. They wanted to include him, offered to give just as they were being given. Even Laserbeak was chirring at him for _morePleasePleasureMorePlease_ , and Soundwave decided to compromise. He was not overly fond of physical touch, but he was not averse to plugging in.

Extending his manipulator cables once again, he sampled from every port offered. And there were many offered, as a flare of pleased excitement went through the net as soon as the first bot spotted his intentions. Wrist ports, thoracic ports, even the rare cervical port spiraled open in anticipation, their touches growing more and more urgent while they hoped they would be the next to be plugged in.

Ghosts of sensation rippled across Soundwave's plates as the feeds transmitted a one-to-one rendition of whatever the mechs he was currently connected to were feeling. Claws digging into armor seams, sensitive lines being tweaked, hardline cillae repurposed to lick at even more hidden wires and crackle static electricity across them.

The multitude of transmitted feelings added and overlaid in interesting interference pattern when Soundwave was hardlined to two or more mechs at the same time. Together with the sensation bleeding over the net and saturating the EM fields, it was enough of an incentive to give in to the rising tide of pleasure.

Charged ports begged at him, bright beacons of interest in his attention. It was all too easy for his manipulator cables to seek them out and slip into their offered depths, into the waiting hold of receiving cillae and soft calipers holding them in place. And when the data began to stream, charge began to flow, too, from frames and engines that were revved up far beyond necessary energy production. It crackled along wires and between plates, and every static shock brought a small twinge of pleasure.

His servos rose to stroke Laserbeak's airfoils, giving his symbiont some actual physical stimulus in addition to the data charge. The foils fluttered in answer, pressing into his digits. Scritching the tip of his claws along the plate seams, Soundwave gave in to Laserbeak's begging and pulsed some of the charge he was receiving straight into the wires beneath.

The symbiont nearly keened in pleasure, twisting as much as it could docked to Soundwave's chest, trying to bare its armor seams further so that Soundwave could reach deeper and give _more_. Its small spark pulsed like a strobe against Soundwave's, and despite the added capacity of the symbiont processor, it was reaching its limits.

Beneath the rising tide of pleasure, Soundwave's manipulator cables were working almost on their own. Release wrist port. Go to next port.

Oh, a cervical port. If Soundwave had wanted to, he could have hacked and disabled the Eradicon within less than a klik. Cervical ports gave access to nearly all processors and memory cores, making them a prime destination. At the same time though, they gave the best feeds as they were closest to the source and had the most cillae. Soundwave adjusted to the new data intensity – apparently, there were more than three servo's stroking this mech's hip seams, spark seams, and along the port where Soundwave was plugged in. And the mech was nearly insensate from pleasure flooding the net-gestalt while somehow still retaining enough processor capacity to scratch its digits along any armor seam in reach.

The other mech Soundwave was currently plugged into was in nearly the same state, only that it had initiated a double wrist hardline with yet another Eradicon. They had a feedback loop going that pulsed back and forth in ever-increasing intensity, so much that their servos were already twitching from the bleed-over while their minds were locked in a five-mech power-processing cluster.

Release thoracic port. Go to next port.

Amongst the sea of twitching and vocalizing Eradicons, Soundwave was still as a statue, only his manipulator cables active. He had never been one to bleed off charge through motion or seek it through tactile, preferring to let it build up undisturbed until it triggered his safety overload. It was a stoic and ascetic approach, one that had been common to nearly all deep space communicators. Floating out in space for vorns at a time, touch was next to impossible to come by except from symbionts. And so a habit of remaining absolutely still had formed, quite useful when he wasn't alone in space but jacked in to a communications array that would be damaged if he moved in an uncontrolled fashion.

Laserbeak though had no such compunctions, eagerly rolling with the charge and twisting with the tension that Soundwave did not allow himself to express.

There was only little warning before the mech whose cervical port Soundwave was currently plugged into, tipped into overload. The sudden charge flared through the cloud-mind in a bright wave, triggering overload for one other mech at first, and then they all fell in an exponentially growing chain reaction.

As the hub holding all links open, Soundwave was the one to stream the entire intensity at once. Laserbeak keened with the feedback and stretched its airfoils as far as it could, while at the same time clenching its docking calipers in ecstatic pleasure. The wave, dampened by Soundwave paring it down to make it processable for his symbiont, swept it away with high voltage arcs traveling between its widely spread wing spars.

His symbiont's spark overloading so close to Soundwave's was the last straw. From the core of his engine electricity burst through his lines, dissolving all thought into the crackling white noise of ecstasy. Remaining motionless during the overload only intensified the sensation of the charge, static having to reach out to ground itself against anything close-by. The resulting discharges were a pleasure all of their own, and the Eradicons hit by them during their own overload only welcomed the additional charge.

When his main processors rebooted again, Soundwave's first action was to synchronize himself with the specially isolated cores that had been designed for exactly this purpose. Communications needed to be maintained every milliklik, and with any normal mech overload and the consecutive reboot made that an impossibility. Instead of prohibiting deep space communicators from overloading during their vorn-long duties though, the creators of their sub-class had added redundant systems which wouldn't be influenced by any charge growing. Those additional procesors weren't enough to handle regular duty, but they were capable of maintaining connections and recording the sensory buffers for later analysis.

The Eradicons were only now coming around, giving Soundwave enough time to gently untangle his manipulator cables and see to it that all parallel-processing clusters were dissolved without losing any threads. Only then did he unravel the net, the occasional arc still jumping between his plates. Laserbeak still hadn't come online again, but Soundwave wasn't worried. Through their link, he could feel that it had dropped straight into recharge, reassuming its regular physical configuration when docked to his chest.

Slowly, normal communication between Eradicons reignited. Pleased noise rose, both on com and through vocalizer. Their fields pulsed with satiation and remnants of pleasure, gratitude towards Soundwave. He nodded at them before retreating through their masses and leaving their common room. Behind him, the excited chatter burst fully into being now that he was gone. Their words and glyphs joined the multitude of streams he was monitoring through the Nemesis' surveillance feeds, but their talk contained nothing of importance _–_ just exchanging information about their experience.

With the increased distance from the lower levels, the electromagnetic noise grew again until the filtering algorithm for the Eradicon's fields was worthless. Soundwave terminated it and didn't wince when the level of his input suddenly jumped ten percent points. Just as well that Laserbeak was in recharge; it would have urged him to remain in the Eradicons' presence longer.

But it wasn't necessary, because he had managed to repair his code and personality matrix sufficiently. And the subsequent overload had cleared the last of the dead data out of his systems. It would take at least five or six orns until he needed to release again.

For now, it was time to return to the bridge to be a visual reminder that he never let up on his duties.


End file.
